Dim sum and the aquarium

After the long hot walks of the first two days in Hong Kong, I needed to relax a bit on the last day, so I decided to go to the aquarium… But first, dim sum!

I went to the Maxim’s dim sum restaurant in City Hall (two floors up, not the other Maxims one floor up), where there was all manner of tasty dumpling things, and excellent drinks too – I don’t normally like Jasmine tea but theirs was great, really flavourful yet delicate, and the green apple juice was the best apple drink I’ve ever had too.

Ocean Park

Then I took the bus to Ocean Park, a theme park on the south-east end of Hong Kong Island. I’m not big on theme parks as I don’t like rides and crap, but Ocean Park features decent aquariums and even some giant pandas.

The pandas, Jia Jia and Ying Ying (the other one wasn’t around), were just doing what they do best – sitting around on their large furry asses eating bamboo and looking cute :).

The big 4-storey aquarium was packed full of fish, everything from colorful tropical fish through to big manta rays, little Japanese manta rays, sharks, and big fat sedentary fish. Surprisingly they don’t seem to be divided up to stop them eating each other – maybe they just know that at 3:30 in the afternoon a guy in a scuba suit is going to turn up and hand-feed them tasty worms and fish and they get too lazy to eat anything still swimming. The mantas kept trying to lick the diver’s head while he was trying to feed them, must be a strange sensation :).

There’s a separate little walk-through aquarium for the more recently-added Chinese Sturgeon. This ancient ‘living fossil’ fish grows up to 2m long and is considered something of a national treasure.

But the bit I enjoyed the most was the jellyfish displays, which were just beautiful – schools of them gently swimming around under colored lighting, small 2cm ones, patterned Flower Hat Jellyfish with tassles, Pacific Sea Nettles with long trailering cords, Black Sea Nettles with frilly ribbons, and hand-sized Moon Jellies whose internal organs caught the lights’ cycling colors. Really pretty.